Pros
- Flexible automated webinar scheduling
- Webinar video hosting included
- Offers have images & urgency timer
- Flexible email scheduling & segmentation
- Webinar replay automatically included
- Continuous attendance tracking
Cons
- Can't change image on some landing pages
- Offers cover part of chat messages
- Overview of interactions not easily found
Best or unique feature
- Timewalk feature shows a great overview of all the attendee interactions
Webinar Types & Setup
Audience Interactions
Presentation Tools
Pricing & Trial
Webinar Funnel Pages
Video Engine & Support
Webinar Replay
Email Reminders
Mobile Devices
Analytics & Exports
ElasticWebinar is a new player in the automated webinar space. In this ElasticWebinar review, we’ll take a look at the most important features you should keep an eye out when choosing your automated webinar software. For example, you’ll learn:
- How can you build a beautiful webinar registration page?
- What are the automated webinar interactions?
- What about the webinar follow-up & analytics?
Let’s dive right in and see if ElasticWebinar is a decent choice to automate your pre-recorded webinar sessions.
Automated Webinar Setup in ElasticWebinar
When you’re setting up the webinar, you’ll immediately notice the clean and smooth user interface.
Setting up the webinar only takes a couple of clicks. All you have to do is:
- Insert the video from e.g. YouTube or file
- Create an attractive webinar title
What I noticed to be a bit odd during this ElasticWebinar review is that you have to specify the webinar duration. Since you’re creating an automated webinar, the whole video length would be exactly the webinar duration. It’s probably because you can cut it short if necessary.
After creating the webinar, you can edit the event to see more customization options. In fact, the scheduling options become available only in the edit mode. Fortunately, the scheduling is very flexible. You can schedule the automated webinar to start at specific times every day.
Webinar Video Hosting
When creating your webinar, there’s the question of hosting the webinar video file. It’s possible to host the video on YouTube or Vimeo and that’s quite convenient. However, that can leave different watermarks or distracting video plugins. Also, the quality might be decreased due to compression.
One upside for Elastic Webinar is that you can upload your videos directly to the platform, which ensures the video quality is high and the streaming happens directly from the platform, thus creating a more live-like experience for the attendees.
That also means you wouldn’t have to host your webinar videos elsewhere and thus, saving money.
Webinar Funnel Pages and Registration
The webinar registration page is perhaps the most important page of your entire webinar funnel. It’s where the visitor makes the decision to register for the webinar or not. That’s why the webinar registration page has to convey trust and the value of the webinar.
In ElasticWebinar, there are 14 different registration page templates. All of them with different layouts. Some of them even feature a teaser video.
For every template, you can make further edits and customizations. The editor is very visual. You can change all the texts on the registration page and immediately see how it would appear to the visitors.
However, there are a couple of flaws with the registration page editor. First, once you delete a text block you can’t re-add it. You’d have to restore the entire template from scratch to get it back.
Secondly, you can’t change the images on some of the registration page templates. However, by the time you’re reading this, it’s probably already fixed.
It’s also possible to add custom questions to the registration page. The custom questions can be in the form of text fields or checkboxes.
After the visitor signs up for the webinar, they can be redirected to a specific URL. For example, it could be a product page or an informational article that fits the webinar topic.
Once the attendee has registered for a webinar, they’ll be taken to the thank you page. This thank you page has all the necessary details – webinar title, time and “Add to calendar” buttons. These are useful if the webinar is happening at a time where the attendee has to come back.
Alternatively, the registration page button can also be injected to your own website. For that, you can just copy the registration button JavaScript code snippet.
Webinar Reminders & the Email Editor
The email scheduling option is quite flexible in ElasticWebinar. You can schedule to send webinar reminders x days and x minutes before the webinar.
That’s really useful for maximizing the webinar attendance rate.
The email editor is also very extensible. You can change the email subject and all the body text. Alternatively, you can just use the default email message if you don’t feel like changing it.
The email content editor is powered by TinyCloud and also features shortcodes for:
- Webinar date & time
- Webinar title
- Webinar link & replay link
- Host name
- Attendee name & email
Another feature I enjoyed during this ElasticWebinar review is the email segmentation option. For the follow-up email, you can create 2 segments:
- People who attended your webinar (show ups)
- People who signed up, but didn’t attend (no shows)
That means you can create a different message for these segments. You could choose to callback to something that was said or done in the webinar. Or you could sweeten the deal by offering a discount only for the ones who attended your webinar.
ElasticWebinar Automated Interaction Tools
ElasticWebinar features an automation builder, where you can schedule different types of automated interactions that would trigger at a certain time mark during your automated webinar.
In ElasticWebinar, you can create simulated attendees to be there with the actual human in the webinar. This way the attendee wouldn’t feel so alone and the event would feel more live.
As a host, you can actually interact with your automated webinar attendees by joining the “Chat room”. You’ll only see the human attendee chat messages and can just moderate the chat by answering them. This is a great feature on ElasticWebinar, because it creates a feeling of live-ness.
You can even turn on the notification bell, so it would make a *beep* when someone sends a message during the webinar.
Automated Info Messages
Automated info messages are messages pinned by the host. The advantage of those is that they’re more eye-popping and they won’t get lost in the chat. They’re best used to notify the attendee about something important.
Automated Polls
Running automated polls is another way of keeping the attendee engaged. With ElasticWebinar, you can schedule the poll to launch at a certain time and to stay active for x minutes.
After the voting timer runs out, the voting results are shown to the attendee. You can pre-determine the poll results. So, actually the attendee vote won’t even be shown, because the voting results are automatic and pre-determined.
However, the benefit for you is that you’ll get to collect the vote of each webinar attendee. To be truthful with your attendees, make the predetermined poll results reflect the actual attendee votes from all the sessions.
Automated Offers
Automated offers are probably the most important engagement tool for your automated webinar. Schedule to launch the offer to a point in your webinar where the attendee should be convinced about your product or course.
One thing I liked about the ElasticWebinar automated offers is that you can create an urgency timer. That means the clock will be ticking and the attendees are more likely to click the offer.
One of my favorite parts of this ElasticWebinar review is how the offers are presented to the attendee. The offer is noticeable, but not a pop-up. A lot of other webinar platforms display offers as pop-ups, which can be closed. Luckily, on ElasticWebinar, the offer is minimized, but not closed.
Timewalk - Overview of All the Interactions
After you’ve created all the interactions for your automated webinar, you’d want to see an overview of them and how the experience would look like for the attendee.
For that, there’s the Timewalk feature, which allows you to launch the webinar preview exactly as the attendee would experience it. The different colored pins would show different scheduled interactions, which gives you a coherent automation overview of the webinar.
Webinar Experience on Mobile Devices
The mobile experience in ElasticWebinar is spectacular. The landing page and the webinar room are entirely mobile responsive and well designed. The interaction elements are intuitively found, without sacrificing from the webinar content.
It even works well on landscape mode.
The chat messages and notification are clearly visible and the chat feed can be scrolled.
When a poll is triggered, the attendee gets notified about it. After the voting, the poll results are clearly shown.
The design of the automated offer is really elegant – it’s stickied at the bottom of the screen, along with the urgency timer. It’s clearly attention-grabbing and attractive. It does have a small “close” button, but it won’t entirely disappear. It just gets minimized to the left. That’s one of my favorite parts of the ElasticWebinar review – attendees can’t dismiss the offer.
Webinar Follow-up & Replay Recording
The webinar follow-up is almost as important as the webinar itself. During the webinar, you’re proving your expertise, sharing valuable information and ultimately making an offer. Sometimes, the attendee is not ready to make the purchase decision right then and there.
That’s where follow-up emails come in. Even for an automated webinar, it’s important to follow up with the attendee and encourage them to take further action (to make the purchase).
The emails are quite flexible on ElasticWebinar. Here’s an example of a follow-up email in the attendee’s inbox after the webinar.
It’s encouraged to include the webinar replay link in the follow-up email as well. With ElasticWebinar, you can make the webinar replay available immediately after the webinar has ended or the next day.
The webinar replay is essentially the same video, but without the interactions. The attendee can also seek and pause the video during the replay. It’s useful for the attendee if they want to go through some important parts of the webinar event once more.
Automated Webinar Session Analytics
For all your past webinar sessions, there are detailed attendance statistics available. In ElasticWebinar, the webinar dashboard displays:
- Number of total registered users
- How many of them attended the webinar
- How many of them watched the replay
- How many attendees were there during peak time
- When was the peak time
You’ll also see the continuous overview of the engagements.
You’ll also get a full overview of the registered attendees and their contact details. There’s an overview of delivered emails as well, but unfortunately, there’s no metrics about open rates and click-through rates.
The interaction analytics gives an overview of the chat messages and poll votes from the attendees. That’s where you’ll see which attendee asked which questions.
There’s no landing page conversion analytics on ElasticWebinar. However, you can inject Google analytics pixel into the registration page, thank you page or live room. By doing that, you can track the visitor count on your landing page and see how well it converts visitors to attendees.
You can also inject the Facebook tracking pixel, so you can target visitors to join the webinar. In terms of other integrations, ElasticWebinar has a Zapier API key, which you can use to integrate with any marketing platform or CRM software, which is supported by Zapier.
ElasticWebinar Pricing & Trial
There is a forever free package on ElasticWebinar, which acts as a trial package. It has a 10-minute session limit, so you can’t host serious webinars on it. It’s just for giving it a try.
The “Starter” package has a 1-hour session limit and has all the features we’ve discussed. To be honest, that’s the most reasonable package, because your attendees won’t be able to focus for more than 60 minutes anyway. This package also allows up to 50 simultaneous attendees in the same session. If you’re running webinars 2-3 times per day, it’s enough.
Compared to the market leader EverWebinar, it’s basically the same price. However, if you factor in that ElasticWebinar hosts your webinar video files as well, then it’s actually cheaper than EverWebinar.
One advantage of ElasticWebinar is that the company is still small and your support requests will be handled with care. First adaptors can also have an influence on the features that would be built.
ElasticWebinar Review Summary
To summarize the ElasticWebinar review, I’d say it’s a very straight-forward and easy-to-use automated webinar platform. It has all the essential features that you’d expect when you’re creating your automated webinar campaigns – beautiful landing pages, scheduled interactions and follow-up emails.
Overall, it has all the necessary aspects for an automated webinar platform. All that with an easy setup and beautiful design. That’s why we can recommend ElasticWebinar.
